The Obama administration announced proposed power plant restrictions requiring a 30 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions from 2005 levels. The regulations allow states some latitude in formulating plans to meet their mandated emissions cuts, but states will almost certainly shut down most or all of their coal power plants to meet the mandates.

Coal is the least expensive widely available source of electricity, but it also emits the most carbon dioxide.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce published a report finding EPA’s carbon dioxide restrictions will kill 224,000 jobs and reduce the nation’s economic output by $51 billion per year. The carbon dioxide restrictions will cost the average U.S. household nearly $500 per year.

“While it is important to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, this should not be achieved by EPA regulations,” said Landrieu. “Congress should set the terms, goals and timeframe. Greater use of natural gas and stronger efficiency measures adopted by the industry have already helped us reduce carbon emissions to their lowest levels in 20 years, and this should continue.”

“This proposed regulation is all pain and no gain. This is supposed to be about climate, but even if you trust the United Nations climate models, this regulation would result in no climatically relevant decrease in warming,” said Daniel Simmons, director of state affairs at the Institute for Energy Research. “In fact, EPA didn’t even bother to run a climate model to show how this would affect climate because they knew the results were too small.”

Scientist Ross McKitrick debunked the Obama administration’s assertions that global warming and power plant emissions are causing thousands of premature deaths each year. McKitrick applied the Obama administration’s statistical assertions to historical mortality data and found the administration claimed air pollution caused more deaths than the total number of people who died from all causes combined.

The Obama administration’s National Climate Assessment landed with a thud after being sharply criticized on a variety of fronts. Heartland Institute Senior Fellow James M. Taylor pointed out staffers from activist groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, Planet Forward, The Nature Conservancy, and Second Nature had lead roles writing the report, which generated a great deal of media attention to the assessment’s lack of objectivity. A United Press International article on the assessment noted in its lead paragraph that Taylor described the assessment as “laughable” for its bias. Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Peter Ferrara debunked many of the assessment’s specific assertions in a column he wrote for Forbes.com.

Registration remains open for The Heartland Institute’s 9th International Conference on Climate Change July 7–9 in Las Vegas. The speaker lineup includes, among others, Patrick Moore, Christopher Monckton, Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, John Coleman, Willie Soon, and Sen. James Inhofe (via video). The conference program features three concurrent tracks of information: science, public policy, and communications. In all, the conference will feature nearly 60 speakers participating in five plenary sessions and 21 break-out sessions. More information is available at http://climateconference.heartland.org/.

Environmental scientist Daniel Botkin, who has held faculty positions at Yale University, the University of California, and George Mason University, told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Science, Space, and Technology that United Nations global warming predictions have failed miserably and are likely to continue doing so in the future. Botkin emphasized that he used to subscribe to global warming alarmism but recently became a skeptic after discovering crucial flaws in the alarmist narrative.

Climate scientist Roy Spencer and Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast debunked the myth that 97 percent of the world’s scientists believe humans are causing a global warming crisis. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Spencer and Bast pointed out flaws in the methodologies of surveys asserting the 97 percent consensus, as well as widespread misrepresentation of what questions were and were not asked in these surveys. “There is no basis for the claim that 97% of scientists believe that man-made climate change is a dangerous problem,” Spencer and Bast concluded.

Portions of Lake Superior are still covered with ice, marking the latest ice cover ever recorded. The ice previous latest date with ice on Lake Superior was May 29 in 1996 and 2003. The current ice coverage has already extended that record by more than a full week.